KING: Woman who lied about Emmett Till should be prosecuted and all historical accounts should be revised

A large crowd gathers outside the Roberts Temple Church of God In Christ in Chicago on Sept. 6, 1955, as pallbearers carry the casket of Emmett Till, a 14-year-old boy who was slain while on a visit to Mississippi. (AP)

Something truly terrible happened 62 years ago. 14 year old Emmett Till, doing as black children from Chicago often did during the summer, was down South visiting his extended family in Mississippi. Shortly before he arrived in Mississippi a well-known black activist and community organizer, Lamar Smith, was shot and killed right in front of the county courthouse. Nobody was ever held accountable for the crime.

In the shadows of Smith's murder, Emmett Till himself was kidnapped, tortured, mutilated, shot to death, then weighed down and dumped him in the Tallahatchie River. His bloated, naked, disfigured body was found three days later wrapped in barbed wire tied to a heavy fan blade. Unlike Lamar Smith, Till was no activist or organizer. He was just a boy. Two men, Roy Bryant and J.W. Miliam, after being acquitted in about an hour, later admitted that they did it.

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Emmett Till (Uncredited/AP)

And for the past six decades, every single account of why Till was lynched was always centered around some version of him sexually harassing a 21-year-old white woman named Carolyn Bryant, wife of Roy Bryant, in a local convenience store. Bryant testified in court, that Till not only whistled at her, but grabbed her hand, then said something sexually lewd to her. Now, in a book by Duke University Professor Timothy Dyson entitled "The Blood of Emmett Till," he reveals that Bryant admitted she exaggerated.

"That part's not true," said Bryant of her long held story that Till made verbal and physical advances toward her.

I have to stop right there. "That part" is the central justification given by the killers for why Emmett Till was kidnapped, tortured, shot, killed, and dumped in a river.

"That part" is not a small peripheral part of what happened to Emmett, but it is the foundational excuse that Roy Bryant and J.W. Miliam gave for his lynching. In FBI documents on the case,they uncovered a statement where Carolyn Bryant later said she told her husband the day before Emmett was lynched that Emmett both grabbed her and sexually harassed her — which is the very facts she now confesses were a lie.

Carolyn Bryant in 1955 (GENE HERRICK/ASSOCIATED PRESS)

When those men, armed with pistols, drove to the home young Emmett was staying in at two in the morning, and threatened to kill Till's family if they didn't turn over the "n----r who did the talking," they weren't asking anyone who whistled, they were referencing the very talking that Carolyn Bryant later testified about under oath. If she told her husband this lie before the murder, then she caused this. Those men lived and worked alongside black folk every single day. They likely targeted young Emmett because of the very lies that she now admits to.

From 1955 until today, you'd be hard pressed to find a single account of what happened to this young Chicago boy without Carolyn Bryant's extensive lies trailing somewhere close behind. "That part" that she now says is "not true" was not some tabloid fodder created by strangers. She testified that it was true. The claims that Till grabbed her and made a sexual advance on her came from her own mouth.

First and foremost, even if young Emmett Till had done any of the things he was accused of, he did not deserve to have even a single person lay their hands on him. This new revelation from Bryant is not to absolve Till from guilt and is not some version of "well, I guess he didn't deserve to be lynched after all." Had he done what she testified he did, but been white, he would have never been lynched. With that said, Carolyn Bryant should be prosecuted. She lied under oath. If she told her husband this lie before the killing, her actions directly caused Emmett Till's murder. It was not simply a harmless false report, but something far more nefarious.

It doesn't matter how old she now is. She should stand trial for her actions. The Till family, many whom I've come to know over the past few years, is still very actively affected by what happened to Emmett all those years ago. It shaped everything about their family for generations. They deserve justice. No matter how delayed it may be, Carolyn Bryant and anyone else who is alive and contributed to Till's death, directly or indirectly, should be held accountable.

Like Nazis tracked down decades after their actions contributed to the deaths of millions of innocent Jews, white supremacists and those whose actions contributed to the terrible era of lynching and racial violence should be tracked down and prosecuted - no matter how much it costs or how long it takes.

Lastly, every single historical account of Emmett Till's life and death needs to be revised. As of this writing, virtually every online record of his death, from his Wikipedia page on down, includes exhaustive lies about what people claimed he said and did to this woman. At this moment, Wikipedia, for instance, contains several paragraphs about the accusations of what he did. They came almost exclusively from Bryant and her family. While many of his own friends have long since said those things were not true, now that Carolyn Bryant herself has said they weren't true, it is essential that this nation does the hard work of correcting every single account to remove this lie from being a part of his history.

Janelle Harper, 54 (r.), wipes her eyes during a service dedicated to Emmett Till at the Roberts Temple Church of God in Chicago in this 2009 file photo. (Zbigniew Bzdak/AP)

Emmett Till was not lynched because he sexually harassed Carolyn Bryant or whistled at her. He was lynched because he was black. He was lynched because he was visiting a bigoted town in an era where violence against black bodies was rarely treated as a crime. To ever tell his story, in short or long form, without saying that his murder was rooted in white supremacy is a lie in and of itself.

In fact, a historical project should be launched, and I am fully willing to get behind it, to ensure that the historical record of his life and death, from this point forward, is accurately told. Some of why the United States still so painfully struggles with issues of race and racism is because we have not fully come to grips with the wrongs of our past. This new narrative that is emerging generations after Till's murder, is but the latest proof of the fact that the United States has failed to honestly address the sickness of its soul. Now is as good a time as any for us to get started.